Ageless Larry ‘Spiderman’ McBride Still Enjoys Madness of Motorcycle Drag Racing

Aw, come on, Larry McBride. This is madness. What the hell are you thinking?

You’re 62 years old. You have a wife, two daughters and three adorable grandkids. You’ve broken enough bones to have an orthopedic surgeon on speed dial. You’ve had a paralyzing left-side stroke and more gnarly road rash than any 10 skateboarders combined. And what about the air ambulance ride after that engine exploded under you in New Jersey in 2015? Or the near-death crash in Florida in 1992 that sidelined you for almost a year?

But there you are, ready for another season of sprawling all over a 1,500-hp Top Fuel motorcycle and guiding it down a quarter-mile drag strip. If all goes well, you’ll reach the other end in five seconds at about 265 mph. But if anything goes even slightly wrong … well, let’s not think about that.

Come on, man, this is madness. What the hell are you thinking?

“The way the world is today, you can get killed walking across the street,” the world’s quickest and fastest (and craziest?) motorcycle drag racer once told a visitor to his shop in Newport News, Virginia. “Are you afraid to walk across the street?” He expounded: “I have a lot of respect for these things, but I’m not afraid of them. I don’t have any fear on the bike; I’m confident in what I’m about to do. I focus on one thing down-track and get rid of everything in my peripheral vision. You get in trouble if you focus on anything other than that one spot at the other end.”

McBride takes a few seconds to ponder his lifestyle. “Maybe I don’t have anything left to prove, but I still love it and I still want to do it another two or three years,” he says. “Besides, I’ve got to make a living, and this is a big part of my living. I’m passionate about it. Other than being with my family, there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing. In a way, it’s more fun now because I’ve done so well for so long that there’s no pressure.

“I don’t have any fear on the bike; I’m confident in what I’m about to do.”

“It used to be that any run that didn’t set a record or wasn’t fast enough, people would wonder what was wrong. Maybe I still won, but just winning wasn’t enough for some people. There was that big bull’s-eye on my back, and it got bigger and bigger the quicker and faster I went. Now? I don’t let it bother me. As a racer, there’s not a lot more I can do, is there?”

So, what’s it like out there, hanging all over that low-slung motorcycle with nothing but leathers, a helmet and God between you and the track? “It’s really indescribable,” he says thoughtfully. “It’s kind of like a woman trying to describe what it feels like to have a baby. Nobody really understands except me and that woman.”

Any conversation about the most dominant racers in any discipline over any period of time anywhere on Earth must have McBride near the top. The tall, trim, gray-headed rider known as “Spiderman” has been setting quarter-mile records, breaking them, then setting and breaking them again and again for the past 40-plus years. He’s won 20 Top Fuel world championships with various sanctioning bodies, including 18 in the past 20 years. As things now stand, the only thing that can consistently beat him is physics: you know, that little matter of time travel … distance vs. time.

“I don’t know what the ultimate limitation is,” he says of covering the quarter-mile as quickly as humanly possible on two wheels. “Top Fuel bikes stayed in the six-second range for 18 to 20 years. I was the first in the five-second range, when I went 5.99 at 248 (mph) in October of 1999 in Houston. That turned the drag-bike world upside down. I was the first in the 5-point-8s, the first in the 5-point-7s, the first in the 5-point-6s, and the first in the 5-point-5s. The record is now my 5.50 at 264.96 last November near Valdosta, Georgia.

“There’s certainly a 5-point-4 run out there somewhere, and I’d like to get it. But under that? I don’t know if it’ll happen while I’m still out there. The technology and the tracks are so good now that a 5-point-4 is within reach. We’re getting more horsepower to the ground than ever. I shut off a little early on my 5.50 at Valdosta, and that might have cost me a 5.40-something pass. You know, it’s always something. There’ll never be a perfect pass.”

In 1975 at just 18, McBride made his first drag-bike pass on a Saturday night at Richmond, Virginia. He was already an accomplished motocross racer—he and future NASCAR star Ricky Rudd were contemporaries—but had never drag-raced. A colleague at a local Honda dealership offered him a one-off pass on his Kawasaki 750 … which McBride promptly rode faster and quicker than the colleague ever had. After that, the Kawasaki ride was his and a career was born.

During the next 40-plus years he’s ridden for a handful of local and national teams/owners/sponsors. He’s advanced from weekly shows on street bikes at backwater dirt tracks to nitro bikes at famous venues in major cities in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico. Success didn’t come easy: His first championship didn’t come until 1991, in his 16th season.

He’s progressed from 12.11 seconds and 104.00 mph that first night in Richmond to his current world records of 5.50 seconds and 264.96 mph. He and his brother, Steve, build their own engines and chassis in Newport News, then do virtually all the engineering and race planning. Steve watches over his brother’s 18-foot-long bike like a lioness watching over her cubs.

What started as that casual one-off on the Kawasaki 750 has grown into a Hall of Fame-worthy career. “This is all we do,” McBride said of himself and Steve. (Tuners/crewmen Roland and Chuck Stewart, Charlie Lynch, and John Dixon are race-weekend regulars.) “This is our life. We have another brother who hunts and fishes; Steve and I drag-race. We’re here (at the shop) all day almost every day, except Sundays and when we’re on the road. Hobbies? Racing is our hobby, our life, our world.”

“Racing is our hobby, our life, our world.”

Oh … about that famous “Spiderman” nickname that once triggered a trademark-infringement squabble: “The track announcer at Indy for the 1980 U.S. Nationals called me that when he saw me moving around on the bike, using my size to stay in the groove. He said I was ‘crawling around on that bike like a spider,’ and it stuck.”

Maybe so, but come on, old man … what are you thinking?

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